Talk:enantiornitine

RFV discussion: August–October 2020
Is this spelling correct or even attested? The normal rules of English spelling would mean it should be spelled enantiornithine with a th, the same as enantiornithean and Enantiornithes. A cursory search of scholarly articles on Google seems to prefer the th spelling. 86.158.183.119 17:39, 27 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Possible context: SemperBlotto has optimistically added a lot of words from the journal PLOS ONE, which publishes a lot of international stuff without proofreading the English. Since most European languages don't seem to have the th sound /θ/, a common error is to write t instead. (Or if you're a bit radical you might just see it as emerging ELF.) Equinox ◑ 19:09, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I have a pretty substantial collection of scientific papers on Enantiornithes. "Enantiornithine" is definitely the normal form; it appears in hundreds of papers.
 * The form "enantiornitine" appears in a number of papers, but only in literature cited sections, in reference to Zheng X, Zhang Z, Hou L. 2007. A new enantiornitine bird with four long rectrices from the Early Cretaceous of northern Hebei, China. Acta Geologica Sinica (English Edition) 81: 703–708.. That paper really does say "enantiornitine" in its title, but in the text it uses "enantiornitine" once and "enantiornithine" about ten times.
 * "enantiornithean" is similarly marginal, as a matter of fact. It appears mostly in citations to Harris JD, Lamanna MC, You H, Ji S, Ji Q. 2006. A second enantiornithean (Aves: Ornithothoraces) wing from the Early Cretaceous Xiagou Formation near Changma, Gansu Province, People’s Republic of China. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 43: 547–554.. They are more intentional about it, though, and explain that "The term “enantiornithean,” rather than “enantiornithine,” is used herein as an informal shorthand for a member of the clade Enantiornithes because the latter implies the existence of, and membership in, a clade “Enantiornithinae” despite the fact that no such clade has ever been recognized." But I did not find that anybody else has followed this definition.
 * I'm not sure that renders these two terms sufficiently widely used for inclusion in Wiktionary. Do citations of article titles count as usages for the purposes of WT:ATTEST? Ucucha (talk) 02:47, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

RFV-failed. All but one of the citations I could find that used "enantiornitine" used that form once and "enantiornithine" other times. I believe it is a typo. Kiwima (talk) 19:56, 8 October 2020 (UTC)